Ideas In Things

It really annoys me when YA authors confuse clothing with characterization.  For example, telling us the character wore an Abercrombie sweatshirt and Lucky jeans does not tell me what they are like.  I think this is more prevalent in YA fiction because adult authors assume that teens are hyper-conscious of their looks and pay attention to brands.  They do.  But that doesn’t mean that they need it (or want it) in their literature.  The exception would be a single piece of clothing that really does characterize someone and is linked to other character traits.

For example: Every day he wore the same black hooded sweatshirt with the frayed cuffs and the broken zipper.  The dark color hid the saliva marks where he nervously chewed his sweatshirt strings, hoping the teacher wouldn’t check their homework.

Really liked this quote from an interview with author David Mitchell about writing and how his new book is more preoccupied with what he describes as “human mud” and less experimental in its structure and form.

“The reason we love the books we love – it’s the people.  It’s the human mud, the glue between us and them, the universal periodic table of the human condition.  It transcends.”

Read the whole article in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine.   I read his book Black Swan Green and I’m interested to check out Cloud Atlas.

My current work in progress is about a young man who runs away with a group of Freegans.  This recent article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine features a group of self-identified Freegans squatting in an abandoned mansion in Buffalo, New York.

She does it again!  I just finished Sara Zarr’s third novel; Once Was Lost.  I loved the first two I read; Sweethearts and Story of a Girl, but this one might be her best.  Zarr does a masterful job of combining an interesting and page-turning plot with authentic teenage voices, real and complex adult characters.  This latest book exemplifies what I wrote about in an earlier post about layers of conflict.  There is a mystery which is central to the story, but also family conflict, love interests and quarrels between friends.

On her website I read that Story of a Girl was her fifth novel written but first published.  It gives me hope.